What is an E-commerce Dashboard?

Information is wealth for e-commerce companies. As a business owner of an online store, you may want to track revenues, operational costs, inventory, promotions, customer feedback, and more. This information can help you identify market trends, changes in consumer behavior and impending issues with your online store that may require your immediate attention.

However, there are two issues that every e-commerce business owner wants to overcome with e-commerce data. They are:

1. Time-consumption: It takes a lot of time and effort to analyze data and convert it into at-a-glance visualizations that help guide informed decision-making. E-commerce business owners often complain about their teams wasting a lot of time searching for the data on key metrics such as conversions, average order value, the performance of marketing channels, customer acquisition cost, and shopping cart abandonment rate.
2. Excessive data: E-commerce analytics tools gather and analyze a plethora of information about various KPIs of an online store. Sometimes, the decision-making insights and reports generated by these e-commerce analytics tools can be overwhelming. It does not mean that implementing an ecommerce analytics solution is bad. The issue here is that e-commerce businesses are unable to streamline this information to generate customized reports and visualizations about only a few selected metrics.

The only solution that can address these two issues is an e-commerce dashboard!

An e-commerce dashboard is a user interface that displays a set of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the sales, revenue, products, and customers of an e-commerce business.

In this guide, you’ll learn about popular KPIs for e-commerce platforms, various examples of e-commerce dashboards, and how they can provide a complete and comprehensive view of your data for sales, marketing, customers, and products.

How do businesses benefit from e-commerce Dashboards?

Businesses benefit from e-commerce dashboards in many ways.

• Informed decision-making: Customized dashboards bring relevant data together and empower users to make informed decisions.
• Bird's eye view: Dashboards provide a bird’s eye view of various metrics and KPIs. You can understand what’s happening with a particular department just by looking at the computer screen.
• Team motivation: The statistics about the sales, progress towards financial goals, and KPIs help you keep your staff engaged with the work. They spark healthy competition within their respective teams and encourage team members to work smarter.
• Accurate forecasting: An e-commerce dashboard built with appropriate KPIs can provide a clear picture of past and present activities. Online retailers can use these real-time insights for accurate forecasting.

Popular KPIs and Metrics for Ecommerce Dashboards

Business owners aim to track a wide range of KPIs and metrics that help assess the performance of their online store. Here is a list of the top 12 KPIs and metrics you may want to track on an e-commerce dashboard:

• Revenues: Expressed in both Gross and Net with specific revenue preferences, like shipping, discounts, and taxes.
• Lifetime value (LTV): LTV is the revenue that an organization generates from a customer throughout the entire business relationship.
• Profit Margins: This is the percentage you bring home after considering your cost of goods sold and advertising expenses. This can be broken down by product and order.
• Refunds: It's good to understand the quantity and value of refunds. You might identify some problem products.
• Average order value (AOV): AOV is the average amount of money a customer spends per transaction.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): CAC is the amount that an e-commerce store spends to acquire a customer.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): ROAS is the percent of return an online business generates on advertising expenses. It enables you to determine the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website without viewing the second page.
• Top Channels: These help you identify which channels are actually bringing you revenue.
• Inventory Velocity: Provides you with the ability to measure depletion days for your remaining inventory.  
• Top Customers and Segments: Understanding who your best customers are, where they're from, and what they buy helps you market your products to the right people. 
• Sell-through rate: Identifies the amount of inventory a business has sold versus the inventory received from the manufacturer.

Ecommerce Dashboard Examples

E-commerce businesses can create different dashboards based on their requirements. They can club a few KPIs and metrics to generate at-a-glance visualizations of their store performance. For instance, your online store can use metrics such as AOV, revenue by channel, spending by channel, and conversion rate to create a full-funnel dashboard.

Let’s take an in-depth view into a few dashboard examples that help you assess your overall store performance, marketing performance, efficiency of customer support, and more.

Dashboard Metrics to Check If Your Store is Working

Online stores, unlike physical stores, don’t have specific store operating hours. They are expected to be up and running 24/7. 

But how will you monitor if the store is working?

You can create an e-commerce dashboard with the help of metrics such as website response time, number of visitors on the site, most recent order, page load time, order volume by region, order volume by device, hourly order volume, and others.

These metrics enable you to check if orders are processing smoothly and customers are checking out without any obstacles. With this type of dashboard, you can quickly flag any issues with your website and get them fixed.

Dashboard Metrics to Check If Your Store Has Issues

Operational issues can derail an ecommerce business. By tracking operational metrics in areas such as inventory, promotions, and fulfillment, you can easily address operational issues before they negatively impact your profitability and customer satisfaction.

Dashboard metrics for inventory

• Sell-through rate
• Number of items in stock
• Depletion Days
• Out-of-stock date
• Holding Costs
• Retail Value

Dashboard metrics for promotions/marketing

• Ad spend by channel and campaign
• Conversion by channel and campaign
• ROAS by channel and campaign
  
• LTV by channel and campaign
• Email revenue

Dashboard metrics for Shipping

• Shipping Cost by Carrier
• Avg Shipping Cost
• Orders Shipped

Weekly or Monthly Store Performance Dashboards

Continuous monitoring helps you thrive in your e-commerce business. It makes sure that your business is on track to achieve its long-term objectives. Weekly or monthly performance dashboards help you assess how your store is performing this week versus the last week, or this month versus the last month.

Are your online sales going up? Is your customer acquisition cost going down? What are your best performing products? Is your store on track to meet this quarter’s targets?

Weekly and monthly performance dashboards that represent metrics related to customer acquisition, sales performance, and orders can help you answer these questions and encourage you to make informed decisions for the growth of your online store.

Dashboard metrics for customer acquisition

• Customer acquisition cost
• Number of new customers
• Number of returning customers

Dashboard metrics for sales performance

• Number of orders this week vs. last week, or this month vs. last month
• Gross sales
• Revenue per visitor
• Top customer segments or geographies by revenue

Dashboard metrics for orders

• Top selling products by profit and volume
• Average order value
• Cost per order
• Profit Margins
• Amount refunded

Customer Support Dashboards

Over 58% of respondents in a recent survey have said that they will sever a business relationship if the customer service is bad. Customer support plays a critical role in retaining your customers and increasing customer lifetime value (CLTV). A customer support dashboard provides a 360-degree view of your customer service and helps you take the appropriate steps needed to improve your customer service team's performance.

The following are key metrics associated with customer support dashboards:

• Number of open tickets
• First response time
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Average response time

Marketing Performance Dashboards

E-commerce sites attract traffic from various channels including search engines, paid search, social media, email marketing, and more. A small change in the performance of these channels can impact your bottom line. A marketing dashboard that incorporates metrics related to your overall marketing performance, marketing campaigns, and individual marketing channels can help you optimize the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Dashboard metrics for marketing performance

• Traffic by channel or conversions by channels
• Revenues by channel
• Total ad spend vs. total revenue

Dashboard metrics for paid search

• Total ad spend
• Cost per click
• Conversions and revenues per campaign

Dashboard metrics for email campaigns

• Email open rate
• Email click-through rate
• Conversions per email or revenue per email

Create your own ecommerce dashboard template with Glew

Creating your own customized dashboard templates is always advisable because it enables you to view insights on only a few areas that need constant monitoring. It eliminates the analysis paralysis and helps business owners make more informed decisions. The dashboard examples provided in this guide can help you identify issues with your e-commerce store and track your performance across all of your business departments.

Glew offers automated multichannel e-commerce dashboards that provide a unified view of products, customers, promotions, inventory, fulfillment, and more. Glew’s e-commerce analytics dashboards enable you to bring all your data sources together and track the most important KPIs at the click of a button.

Thousands of brands and agencies trust Glew’s e-commerce analytics dashboards for the following reasons:

1. Simple and user-friendly interface
2. Hundreds of pre-built dashboards with ecommerce KPIs for marketing, products, and customers
3. Easy customization with drag-and-drop features and filters
4. Best in class customer support

Want to learn more about Glew’s ecommerce analytics dashboards? Schedule a demo today.